“... women’ were wearing ‘the dress of ladies’ and ‘poor clerks … clothes like those of the king’. This spending caused rapid inflation. Prices were out of control: two pennies for a gallon of beer. The London authorities tried to fix a ‘reasonable price’ for meat – seven pence for a capon baked in pastry, sixpence for the best kind of ...”

“... any way memorable, even a chapter that’s memorable. I’ve always liked ‘Henderson the Rain King’ for one. Oh no. Dull, dull ... I think he’s a dull man and a dull writer. Hello, Saul, how are you? Do you feel that way about Philip Roth? Oh, only more so. Philip Roth’s quite funny in a living-room but ... forget it. Bernard ...”

“... backwater into ‘the first modern society’. That Parliament should first fight against the king in 1642 and then, seven years later, not simply bring that king to trial but abolish the institution of monarchy was remarkable. That the same royal dynasty should be restored in 1660 only to be forcibly removed in 1688 ...”

“... He has come into all the material collected by John Lehmann’s commissioned biographer, Martin Taylor, who died before he could write a word of it. He has seen photocopies of the extensive diaries, and he has interviewed the survivors and their descendants. Lehmann himself wrote three volumes of dignified autobiography about his work, his ...”

“... dark. The rubies move: they are better, they are beetles.When he entered the university it took Martin a long time to decide on a field of study. There were so many, and all were fascinating. He procrastinated on their outskirts, finding everywhere the same magical spring of vital elixir. He was excited by the viaduct suspended over an alpine precipice, by ...”

“... know how … his fear of waste was so strong.’ In this Edward was an authentic product of King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and of the headmastership of James Prince Lee, a future bishop of Manchester and a disciple of Thomas Arnold, whose educational ideals – the strenuous pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of elevated tone and Christian ...”

“... for some more to come I have been engaged in a formidable task. I have been reading Volume VI of Martin Gilbert’s Life of Winston Churchill. An alarming notice on the cover warns me of the most terrifying penalties if I divulge anything the volume contains. But I think I can risk stating that the volume starts in September 1939 and runs until December ...”

“... man to serve as attorney general for DC; he was later Obama’s attorney general. In a speech on Martin Luther King day in 1995, Holder said that King hadn’t fought against Bull Connor, the racist police chief of Birmingham, Alabama, so ‘we’ could ultimately lose the struggle for ...”

“... enfranchisement for black people in the United States has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out, that even in her ...”

“... for broad groups of “minorities” ’ – the affirmative action which, he wrongly asserts, Martin Luther King Jr opposed. According to Evans, moreover, the ‘ill-judged 1965 Immigration Reform Act’ – it repealed the restrictive, ethnocentric national origins quotas of the 1924 legislation – transformed the ...”

“... funds for the defence of the Scottsboro boys, and when she died, in 1967, her estate went to Martin Luther King and, after his death, to the NAACP.Crowther admires the fact that, in the midst of all this, Parker repeatedly ‘dissected her own privilege’. ‘Soldiers of the Republic’, for example, begins with the ...”

“... booth glows faintly behind Anna, in the depth of the shot, as she paces restlessly up and down. In Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), fantasist Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), on a first date with barmaid Rita (Diahnne Abbott), hopes to impress her by leafing through his autograph album. It’s not long before ...”

“... in harmony with their natural environment. There was poignancy in the remark of the late Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman, who said that before long the sight of sheep in a green field would be a rare delight. A future without such sights is human wickedness. Soon after reading this remark, I saw a television programme about Denmark in which the ...”

“... studies of the subject have appeared since (by historians such as Paul Preston, Raymond Carr and Martin Blinkhorn, to mention three British examples). My memories of Homage to Catalonia were not only of the fine, evocative writing, perhaps Orwell’s best, but of his enthusiasm for the people with whom he had lived and fought. If, for some people of my ...”

“... governments have tried to subdue the Corporation. Mrs Thatcher’s man was said to have been Lord King, privatiser of British Airways, and a highly unsuitable choice that would have been. We have been spared Lord King, who has withdrawn, and rumour has had it that we may be given Lord Barnett instead, someone with no ...”